Online report of the Progressive Review. For 54 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

June 2, 2017

Understanding Trump better

NY Post - Two “extreme” parenting
styles have been linked to children becoming criminal psychopaths in later
life, a study has revealed.

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology
interviewed high-security prisoners and found many have a history of either
total parental neglect, or rigidly controlling, authoritarian parents.

A psychopath is a person who suffers from a chronic mental
disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.

They are defined by their lack of empathy and have a
tendency to manipulate people without any guilt.

The startling research found that all criminal psychopaths
studied also had a history of grotesque physical and/or psychological abuse
during childhood.

Study author Dr. Aina Gullhaugen commented: “Without
exception, these people have been injured in the company of their caregivers.

“And many of the descriptions made it clear that their later
ruthlessness was an attempt to address this damage, but in an inappropriate or
bad way.”

“Either they lived in a situation where no one cared, where
the child is subjected to total control and must be submissive, or the child
has been subjected to a neglectful parenting style.”

Parents cannot be blamed for everything, and there are many
children who have awful upbringings and don’t go on to become criminal
psychopaths.

Michael
D’Antonio,Politico,
2016 - Fred Trump was a fiercely ambitious man who worked seven days a
week and devoted few waking hours to his role as a parent. Although he pushed
his son Donald to prevail in every arena—to be a "killer" and a
"king"—Fred didn’t actually tell the young man how to achieve this
destiny. His way of paying attention to his children was to let them watch him
at work. As Donald Trump told me in an interview for the biography I was
writing about him, he was expected to learn things “by osmosis.” One such
lesson came when Donald was seven years old, and his father was brought before
a U.S. Senate committee investigating abuses in a housing program for war
veterans and middle class families. President Eisenhower had been outraged to
learn of the bribes that developers paid to bureaucrats and of the alleged
profiteering practiced by Trump and others. Ike called them “sons of bitches.”

What is the source of the need that motivates Trump? In his
life story, the most plausible explanation is his stern, demanding, and
ultimately rejecting father. As Donald Trump told me, his father Fred was “very
tough” and “very difficult” and someone who “would never let anything go.” He
was also the man who all but banished his son when he was barely twelve years
old,,,

While Fred Trump was busy scheming and manipulating, his son
developed into a bullying and out-of-control little boy. As Donald recalled to
me, he loved to fight—“all kinds of fights, even physical”—and the teachers and
administrators at the private school he attended in Queens, New York, couldn’t
manage him. The situation was quite embarrassing to Donald’s father, who was a
major benefactor for the school. In exasperation, he abruptly removed his son
from the family home, which was a mansion attended by servants, and handed him
over to the New York Military Academy in Upstate New York. Upon arrival,
twelve-year-old Donald was put into uniform and assigned a tiny cell-like room.
In the days, weeks and years to come he would have to cope with an all-male
culture of competition and hierarchy where physical abuse, carried out by the
students and the adults who supervised them, was part of the routine

In his years as a NYMA cadet, Trump found a new role model
and substitute father in a combat veteran of World War II named Theodore
Dobias. Sergeant Dobias had fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Italy
and seen Mussolini’s body swinging from a rope. He was, in Trump’s telling, a
rough and occasionally demanding man. “In those days they’d smack the hell out
of you. It was not like today where you smack somebody and you go to jail,” he
said. “He [Dobias] could be a fucking prick. He absolutely would rough you up.
You had to learn to survive.” Trump recalled that when he responded to an order
from Dobias with a look that said, “‘Give me a fucking break,’ he came after me
like you wouldn’t believe.”

Like many children who are abused by their caretakers, Trump
came to identify with the drill sergeant Dobias. He was especially drawn to the
sergeant’s way of coaching the baseball team. (Trump was a star player.) With a
nod to football legend Vince Lombardi, Dobias told his boys that “winning isn’t
everything, it’s the only thing.” He put the Lombardi motto on the wall of the
locker room.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for nearly 50 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care